The 50 Greatest Actors Alive: No. 36 Clint Eastwood
Every week through the remainder of 2014, Yahoo Movies is counting down Hollywood’s 50 very best working actors and actresses. Come back to Yahoo Movies every Thursday to see who makes the cut.
Greatest Actor Alive (No. 36): Clint Eastwood
Age: 83
Stating the Case: "You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?" Clint Eastwood isn’t so much a movie star as he is an American icon. The man — and he’s a towering one at 6-foot-4 — is as prominent a figure in our zeitgeist as Mom and apple pie. Although Mom wasn’t known for wielding a .44 Magnum in five feature films.
There’s a lot more to Clint’s extensive filmography than just Westerns (the Man With No Name trilogy, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider, and many, many others) and Dirty Harry movies. He’s also done sexual thrillers, like The Beguiled (1971) and Play Misty For Me (1971); romantic dramas, like The Bridges of Madison County (1995); and experimental character studies, like White Hunter, Black Heart (1990).
Clint’s also right at home in goofy comedies (Every Which Way But Loose, Honkytonk Man), war dramas (Heartbreak Ridge), cheesy action movies (Firefox, The Gauntlet), crime thrillers (Blood Work, True Crime), musicals (Paint Your Wagon) and, of course, Oscar darlings (Million Dollar Baby, Unforgiven).
Not bad for a guy whose film debut was the uncredited role of “Jennings” in Revenge of the Creature (1955).
Breakthrough Role: Eastwood staked his claim as one of the most popular Western stars of all time with his starring role in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the first of several collaborations with legendary director Sergio Leone and the initial installment of the “Dollars Trilogy” (followed by For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). Clint brought true grit to his portrayal of Joe (aka The Man With No Name), a wandering gunslinger who plays two rival families against each other.
The Best of the Best:
5. Gran Torino (2008): Clint took crankiness and compassion to a whole new level as Walt Kowalski, a bitter, bigoted Korean War veteran who ends up befriending the Hmong teenager who tried to steal his prized possession: a 1972 Gran Torino.
4. Million Dollar Baby (2004): Eastwood won the Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture for this rousing and ultimately devastating sports fable about Frankie Dunn, a veteran boxing trainer who finds a surrogate daughter — and a new champion — in the form of Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank).
3. Unforgiven (1992): Eastwood’s ultimate Western is this brutal masterpiece about the evil that men do and the lengths of revenge. Clint plays William Munny, a widowed father and former gunslinger urged out of retirement for one last job: avenging the disfigurement of a prostitute by a couple of thugs.
2. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966): If you see only one other Clint Eastwood Western besides Unforgiven, make sure it’s this one, the sweeping, sordid, and spectacular tale of three Civil War veterans (Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach) on a mission to retrieve a stash of gold buried in a remote cemetery.
1. Dirty Harry (1971): The Man With No Name is definitely high on the list, but Eastwood’s most iconic role is arguably Harry Callahan, the .44 Magnum-packing San Francisco cop who doesn’t play by the rules. Clint debuted the ever-quotable character in this terrific thriller and reprised the role in four other films: Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988).
The BIGGEST Hit: Eastwood’s box-office champion is Gran Torino (2008), which earned $148 million domestically and more than $269 million worldwide. Eastwood had once claimed that it was to be his last on-screen performance and it would have been a heck of a way to throw in the towel, but he ended up starring in Trouble With the Curve (2012), which earned a mere $48 million worldwide.
When adjusted for inflation, Eastwood’s top earners are Every Which Way but Loose (1978) and Any Which Way You Can (1980), the films that had him co-starring with an orangutan named Clyde. In 2014 dollars, they made $289 million and $209 million, respectively, proving that monkey business is also good show business.
With Honors: Eastwood has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor twice, for Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby. However, he has received several accolades for his directing and producing work. He won Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture (as producer) for both Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby. He was also nominated in both categories for Mystic River (2003) and Letters From Iwo Jima (2006).
He’s also a favorite of the American Film Institute, as three of his films have made AFI’s annual list of Movies of the Year: J. Edgar (2011), Gran Torino, and Letters From Iwo Jima.
Fun Fact: “Clint Eastwood” is an anagram for “old west action.” Is that fate or what?
Trademark: Squinty-eyed, raspy-voiced machismo.
Best Fan Tribute: The entirety of Back to the Future Part III (1990) is one big love letter to the western icon as “Clint Eastwood” is Marty McFly’s alias of choice when he goes back to 1885. “What kind of stupid name is that?” asks Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen, maintaining the series’ tradition of the Tannens never being the brightest family on their Hill Valley block.
Most Underappreciated Achievement: He’s best known for being “bad-ass Clint,” but Eastwood got to be “romantic Clint” in The Bridges of Madison County, the adaptation of Robert James Waller’s novel chronicling the short-lived (four days, to be exact) romance between photographer Robert Kincaid and housewife Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep). Eastwood also directed this audience favorite that hits all the right notes as it tugs all the heartstrings.
Special mention should be made of In the Line of Fire (1993), one of Clint’s rare latter-career appearances in a film he didn’t direct himself. Wolfgang Petersen’s slick thriller has Eastwood in the role of Frank Horrigan, a Secret Service agent haunted by the assassination of JFK who takes on a savvy sharpshooter (John Malkovich) looking to take out the current commander in chief.
While we’re at it, a hat-tip also to A Perfect World (1993), a dark and ultimately very moving fable featuring Eastwood as a U.S. Marshal hot on the trail of an escaped convict (Kevin Costner) who’s kidnapped — and befriended — a sheltered young boy (T.J. Lowther).
Catchphrase:
Nobody’s Perfect: Pink Cadillac (1989) is a joyless, appallingly wrongheaded road comedy in which a chemistry-less Eastwood and Bernadette Peters stumble through a ridiculous plot about a bail bondsman tracking down a woman fleeing from her white supremacist husband and his neo-Nazi buddies (fun!). And The Rookie (1990) is the movie in which Eastwood gets sexually assaulted by Sonia Braga.
Moonlighting: Eastwood is known just as much for his directing as he is for his acting. He has directed several of his own starring vehicles, with notable projects that had him strictly behind the camera being Bird, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), Mystic River, Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Letters From Iwo Jima, Changeling (2008), Invictus (2009), Hereafter (2010), and J. Edgar.
Eastwood played Rowdy Yates on 216 episodes of the TV Western series Rawhide (1959-65). He also composes the music for a lot of his films and even occasionally sings — that’s him on vocals on the song heard over the closing credits of Gran Torino, and in his infamous Paint Your Wagon ballad, “I Talk to the Trees.”
Speaking of trees, since 2002 Eastwood has been a Parks Commissioner for California’s Big Basin Redwood Park in Santa Cruz.
He has also dabbled in politics. A former mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, Eastwood has also been a longtime face of the GOP — addressing the 2012 Republican National Convention on behalf of Mitt Romney and notoriously employing an empty-chair metaphor for President Obama.
And for His Next Acts: Eastwood is calling the shots on this summer’s adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical Jersey Boys, opening June 20. He’s currently directing the action thriller American Sniper, and is attached to direct another musical, the zillionth adaptation of A Star Is Born.
See Who Else Has Made ‘Greatest Actors Alive’ List So Far:
#50 Brad Pitt | #49 Sigourney Weaver | #48 Joaquin Phoenix | #47 Paul Giamatti | #46 Forest Whitaker | #45 Matthew McConaughey | #44 Viola Davis | #43 Michael Douglas | #42 Jodie Foster | #41 Ben Kingsley | #40 Javier Bardem | #39 Sally Field | #38 Robert Downey Jr. | #37 Jennifer Lawrence
What qualifies actors for a slot on Yahoo Movies’ running list of the 50 Greatest Actors Alive? First, we limited the pool to actors who are still currently working. Other factors taken into consideration: Pure skill in the craft; their ability to disappear underneath the skin of the characters they portray; versatility and the range of their roles; ratio of strong performances to weak ones; quality of films acted in; strength of recent work; awards and accolades from peers.
